Harvard physicist says meteor may be alien probe, plans expedition to prove it
Global News
Avi Loeb, the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, will scour the depths of the ocean in search of remnants that could prove aliens have contacted Earth.
A prominent Harvard physicist will spend US$1.5 million on an expedition to Papua New Guinea in search of the remnants of a meteor he believes might be an alien probe.
The ambitious expedition is being organized by Avi Loeb, the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department and founder of the extra terrestrial-hunting Galileo Project.
In a blog post, Loeb announced he’s in search of fragments of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, which smashed into Earth in 2014 and exploded into tiny fragments about a hundred kilometres off the coast of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
“Within a couple of months, I will be leading an expedition to collect the fragments of the first interstellar meteor. This meteor is the first near-Earth object ever detected by humans from outside the solar system,” he wrote on Medium.
In his post, Loeb posits that his exploration to the depths of the ocean could possibly turn up fragments of alien technology, launched a billion years ago by an ancient civilization outside our solar system.
“In case we recover a sizable technological relic from the Pacific Ocean, I promised the curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Paula Antonelli, that I will bring it for display in New York. This piece would represent modernity for us, even though it is a relic of ancient history for the senders,” he wrote about his future plans, should his theory prove correct.
Loeb detailed his theory in the blog post, writing that he noticed the object in 2019 and identified it as the first interstellar meteor ever discovered. He also writes that the meteor’s origin was confirmed by NASA and the U.S. Department of Defence last year and that analysis from his team concluded that the meteor was comprised of a material much harder than all of the other 272 meteors in NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies catalog.
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